Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, once was at a party in the Hamptons. A guy came over to him and pointed at a young, 25 year old standing in the party who worked for a big hedge fund. Heller’s “friend” said to him, “see that guy over there? He made more money last year than you will ever make with all of your books combined.”

Joseph Heller said, “Maybe so. But I have one thing that man will never have.”

I hadn’t needed to email a link in Safari in a while and I couldn’t find the ‘Email link to this page’ option. The Share button wasn’t showing Email as an option either. I finally found this Apple Support article that has instructions on how to repopulate the Share menu with available options.

When Nik Wallenda crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in June 2012 he was required to carry a passport ready to present it to Canadian border guards on the Canadian side of the falls. (via SModcast)

Richard Dawkins published his bicycle lock combination in a book and his bike has never been stolen. (via Penn’s Sunday School)

The actual name for spats was spatterdashers. You fastened them over your ankles, to prevent the spatter dashing you according to P. G. Wodehouse. “It’s a shame when things like spats go out.” (via Paris Review)

The term soft mouth is used by breeders and users of hunting dogs to refer to a behavioural tendency to pick up, hold, and carry quarry gently. (via Penn’s Sunday School)

Rafea is the second wife of a Bedouin husband. She is selected to attend the Barefoot College in India that takes uneducated middle-aged women from poor communities and trains them to become solar engineers. The college’s 6-month programme brings together women from all over the world. Learning about electrical components and soldering without being able to read, write or understand English is the easy part. Witness Rafea’s heroic efforts to pull herself and her family out of poverty.

An ocean, a rainforest, the human body, are all co-operatives. The redwood tree doesn’t take all the soil and nutrients, just what it needs to grow. A lion doesn’t kill every gazelle, just one. We have a term for something in the body when it takes more than its share, we call it: cancer.

Angelo on the Latest in Paleo podcast had James Clear as a guest. Apart from diet and fitness James talked about habits, how we start bad ones, how we can break them and replace them with good ones.

I signed up for James' newsletter and read Transform Your Habits.

Time for a little backstory. I’ve wanted to start developing iOS applications in my spare time. I have the equipment, the books, development knowledge, I sit in front of my Mac for hours and hours during any given week and never achieve anything.

In the morning I check email, RSS feeds, BBC News and Digg to see what has happened to the world while I was asleep. After work I sit on the sofa and read a book, but then I check email, RSS feeds, BBC News and Digg before I start making something to eat. After I’ve washed the dishes, when I should be writing applications in Xcode, I check email… well you get the idea. Time passes, one thing links to another, an hour later I’m thinking that there’s no point trying to start anything now I may as well look at Buzzfeed, watch a little TV then go to bed. So by the end of the week I have nothing to show for it.

It’s just a habit. I can break it. Just check email and RSS feeds once a day. The rest of the time do something constructive.

James also wrote that he set himself a task, to write for his blog every Monday and Thursday. That’s his habit, sit down and write.

When film director Stanley Kubrick purchased a Dymo label machine he labelled one draw THINGS. This was later changed to IMPONDERABILIA as part of the Kubrick classification system. (via Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures)

The nickname “Bunk”, given to Detective William Moreland in The Wire, comes from the military meaning your bunk mate. (via Maxim)

The “Naughty. But nice.” advertising slogan for cream cakes was the creation of Salman Rushdie, before he became an author. (via Desert Island Discs)

In one instance, an employee refused to remove a complainant’s details from the company’s system and threatened to “continue to call at more inconvenient times like Sunday lunchtime”.

That is one thing that I don’t regret doing: getting rid of my landline phone. BT and the other telephone companies should be doing more. You should be able to press a button during the call that disconnects and blocks the caller. It’s the person who pays the bill who should be able to decide who gets through and who doesn’t.

A telephone shouldn’t be just another avenue for people to sell you crap you don’t want.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ‘How do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking, ‘How do we LET people pay for music?’

The music industry as a whole has been far too busy trying to suck the last drops from a dying business model. What is important is the music and the artists. The artists who don’t get it will fade away along with their huge advances and ever shrinking royalty cheques.

Philips and Sony based the diameter of the inner hole of a CD on the size of the Dutch dime. (via Tech Hive)

On April 1, 1974, local prankster Oliver ‘Porky’ Bickar flew into the dormant Mount Edgecumbe volcano in Alaska and ignited 100 old tires in the crater. The residents of Sitka, Alaska were convinced that the volcano was erupting. (via QI)

All these years and I now find out that I’ve been ruminating. Previously I always called it ‘grumbling’. An incessant internal dialogue that could last for days or longer, where conversations, questions, responses, problems, what I said and what I should have said, would churn around in my head. Doing that would only make things worse, I’d just get angrier, my heart would race and I always felt that my blood pressure must be off the charts. I could do all this at a moments notice, no matter what else I was doing. Some problems would be forgotten about within a few days, others, maybe longer. There are things that happened years ago that when I think about them today still have the power to irritate me.

I had read Mindfulness in Plain English years ago but had never thought that it covered depression. Not that I really consider myself as depressed, I just thought that there must be a way to feel happier. In the past, whenever there has been some problem, either at work, personally or even some driver on the road, I’d be miserable about it for a few days but a week later I’d wonder what all the fuss was about.

Just reading the first chapters of the book I recognised myself immediately in the pages. Halfway through I was reading an example of someone who had a problem at work and I was doing the very same thing myself.

The book says that this is just ruminating, the more you do it, the worse it gets. If you don’t think about the problem then the problem goes away and you start to feel happier. They are just thoughts. To get this negativity out of your head you have to have something positive to replace it. So you focus on what is happening to you now. Don’t go through life thinking about something else. Feel the chair against your back and the keys beneath your fingers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they’re asking you frolic barefoot through a summer meadow, like the movie version of a hippy. Just bring your mind back to what is happening now. After all they are just thoughts, nagging and irritating they maybe, but just thoughts. You can let them go.

Clay shooters in the UK call “pull!” because in the good old days the live pigeons were released from their basket by pulling a string. Nowadays you could say anything as the machine operates via an acoustic release. (via BBC Olympic Oddities)

The Mycenaean Greeks are thought to have invented the safety pin, or fibula, in the 14th Century BC to fasten garments together. (via BBC Olympic Oddities)

Sir Les PattersonThe online archive of Sir Leslie Colin Patterson. Wit, sage, raconteur, late Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James and Chairperson of the Australian Chapter of the International Cheese Board.